Gender inequality in entertainment

I've had a chance to watch Mustang a few days ago, a directorial debut by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, which has been shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language film as the French official entry. At first I was a bit confused to why France sent a Turkish movie as their representative over Cannes winner Dheepan, but after watching the movie, the tactic seemed more than obvious.

Mustang is a story about five teenage girls who are one day caught playing with boys after school. When their grandmother beats them as punishment for being seen frolicking with boys, they put up a united front of resistance. Local families with marriageable sons are invited over to their house, so that the eldest sisters can be married off. Their house slowly becomes a prison — as walls are heightened and windows barred to keep the girls from running away at night — but they retain their free-spiritedness.

The thing which bothers me the most is the fakeness of the whole movie. Firstly, I have many female friends in Turkey, and none of them were locked behind the bars of their own home until they got married. Most of them are in their 30's, still not married but still a part of the society.

I believe the casting instructions for Mustang were „skinny beautiful girls with long shinny hair“, as they are mostly shot without many clothes. While mostly in their underpants, they often lay in their bedroom hugged, they pet each other and play with each other's hair. Who behaves like that? Except for the youngest sister, they are all portrayed so poorly, to the extent that one of them seems like an extra and doesn’t have a single line until the second half of the movie.

The narrative aspect is the worst and even a fairy tale requires some degree of shading. If the grandmother and the uncle are so conservatively minded, why have the sisters been seemingly able to enjoy total liberty until now? Similar questions also arise with respect to the details of the girls' captivity. So they're canny enough to sneak out again and again unnoticed, but not sly enough to retrieve their mobile phones from the cupboard the grandmother has impounded them in? If the grandmother has confiscated all potential temptations, why are they still able to lounge around in revealing clothing, other than the fact that it permits more catalogue-ready images to be made?

The intention of the movie is clear - to show overly sexualized young girls, or rather say „objects“, who often sneak out, try to escape the repression and dream of a different life. The intention of France is also very clear – to show this crowdpleasing film and those girls to the Academy, which by its demographic structure is mostly represented by old white guys.

Just to draw a comparison, I was really disappointed to see that „You Carry Me“, directed by Ivona Juka, didn't make the cut and didn't get shortlisted for Oscar. This film presents real women, with real problems who cope with they everyday life. The protagonists are three different women with different social backgrounds, they are not little pricesses and they don't need any man to save them. They are multidimensional characters and you can really get to know them sympathize with them. They have their purpose in the movie, they are not extras, and aren't driven solely by their sex instincts.

Ivona Juka, the director, does not depart from an ideological or political platform, nor does she advocate one. She is not trying to portray women as a "minority", or as victims and/ or someone whose freedom is (yet) to be fought for. The film is not a crowdpleaser, yet it has an untipical happy end, which I do not intend to reveal.

One would think that a refreshing look at female characters would be welcoming, but I guess the same old „sex sells“ still dominates the film industry.

Rating for Mustang: 3/10, Rating for You Carry Me: 9.5/10

Only four female directors have been nominated in the Best Director category throughout the Oscars' history. Lina Wertmuller was the first woman nominated for the 1976 film, Seven Beauties. Jane Campion was number two for the 1993 film, The Piano, Sofia Coppola is number three for the 2003 film, Lost in Translation, and number four is the only one to make it to the podium, Kathryn Bigelow for her film The Hurt Locker. After 87 distinct awards races and ceremonies, Bigelow stands as the only female director to win Best Director or Best Picture.

There are several reasons for this most frustrating bit of Oscar trivia, but the most important one lays in the sole structure of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There are less than 400 directors in the Academy, and while it's definitely meritorious that Kathryn Bigelow represents the Director's Branch, of 377 members, only 36 of those people are women. That's fewer than 10%.

In many articles which include Oscar predictions, Angelina Jolie is often mentioned as the only female director this year with the potential to switch up the vast gender gap. Taken into consideration all of the 305 films which are submitted this year for the Oscars, and which are waiting January 14th for the nomination announcement, there are only 43 films directed or co-directed by women, which is 14%

Out of those 14%, a large number of European female directors can be noticed. They have directed some of the best foreign language films this year, which have been widely recommended, such as Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy, Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood, Denis Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang and Ivona Juka’s You Carry Me. All of those films are eligible for Oscars and they are strong contenders for the most important film award in the world.

One may think the gender equality statistics are better overboard, but unfortunately, they are even worse. Since 1988, when the European Film Award was founded, popularly known as the European Oscar, no woman was ever awarded Best Director, nor was any movie directed by a female director awarded Best Picture.

Every year many voices unite in pointing out the inequalities in the film industry, but last season they seemed pretty loud. Ava DuVernay was pronounced snubbed – while her film “Selma” was nominated for Best Picture and Best Song, she was ignored for the Best Director award. DuVernay would have been the first black woman nominated for Best Director in Oscar history. And yet, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, herself the first black woman to gain that role, told Vulture that the Academy doesn’t have a diversity problem “at all.” The voices will surely unite this season also, but the most disappointing thing is that the industry's most powerful body sees no need to improve.

Latest illustration of Hollywood’s gender disparity: No script by a woman

ranks among top 10 vote-getters

Women accounted for only 17 percent of the screenwriters featured on the 2015 Black List, yet another alarming statistic that reflects the state of gender disparity in Hollywood.

Worse, the annual survey of the industry’s best unmade movies is top-heavy with scripts by men, who hold every one of the top 10 vote-getters. The first screenplay with a female writer appears at No. 14 out of 81 scripts: Emma Needell’s family drama “The Water Man,” which was optioned by Oprah Winfrey‘s Harpo Films.

The poor showing for projects with female writers is all the more surprising since the Black List is the result of a survey of 250 show business executives that is 40 percent female.

“The annual list, at the end of the day, is a snapshot of what the industry within the walls is reading,” Black List founder Franklin Leonard told TheWrap. “We’re surveying the entire executive core of the industry… every major studio, major financier and production company that has deals with them. Either way, the number of women is too low.”

The statistic is also jarring given the Black List’s mission of exposing writers outside the Hollywood system to agents and managers — in hopes of diversifying the pool of material from which the voting executives would typically draw.

“We obviously feel that the website has created a bunch of opportunities to represent communities previously underrepresented in Hollywood,” Leonard said of the Black List web portal, which aims to vet scripts and find writers representation.

The organization has had success in diversifying the movie development pool. Kristina Lauren Anderson’s 2014 Black List-winning script “Catherine the Great” will be directed by Barbra Streisand and shepherded by producer Gil Netter.

The top Black List script this year, a film told from the point-of-view of Michael Jackson’s adopted chimp Bubbles, was written by Isaac Adamson — who lives in Chicago, and found his manager Lee Stobby by posting his script to the Black List website.

And the Black List can have an enormous impact in raising awareness — and funding — for projects by undiscovered talent. This year, 36 of the 81 scripts have financiers attached, according to Leonard, and 60 have producers committed.

So the male domination of a list intended to feed the film industry’s entry-level pipeline underscores just how hard it will be to address the industry-wide issue of gender disparity.

Women only accounted for 20 percent of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 700 domestic grossing films of 2014, according to a study released in October. Of those jobs behind the camera, women screenwriters had the worst chances of getting hired — with only 13 percent working on the top grossing films, second only to 9 percent of cinematographers.

In attempts to further balance the gender scales, The Black List will offer a screenwriting workshop in February at the all-female Athena Film Festival in New York.

“Women are writing scripts just as good as men,” Franklin concluded. “We consider it a moral and ethical obligation to do what we can to make sure people that have talent have access to end up on the Black List.”

Article by Matt Donnelly

If aliens were to watch the majority of films Hollywood releases each year, they could be excused for thinking that our world is mainly male, white and has a decidedly adolescent bent.

Closing the gender gap — in both pay and representation — in top-level Hollywood feature films has been a growing battle cry (just ask Jennifer Lawrence, Geena Davis, Patricia Arquette and Meryl Streep, who are among the many who continue to speak out on the problem). Yet this year, a surprising number of notable female-centric movies give some credence to a long-hoped-for tipping point where women's stories can be told in equal measure.

Consider some of 2015's offerings: "Woman in Gold," starring Helen Mirren, which tells the true tale of a woman's fight to recover artwork stolen by the Nazis; "Suffragette," starring Carey Mulligan in a story about women's struggle to win the vote (and written, directed and produced by women); "Brooklyn," the story of a young woman (Saoirse Ronan) coming into her own in a new land; "Carol," the 1950s-set tale of two women (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) falling in love; "Joy," a based-on-real-life story about the woman (Lawrence) who invented the Miracle Mop. Then there's the upcoming Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy "Sisters," and don't forget "Pitch Perfect 2," written and directed by women, in which the Barden Bellas returned to rake in nearly $300 million in worldwide box office.

It's a fine list of female-oriented films boasting some solid successes on both sides of the camera and at the box office. But can those gains be sustained?

Some quick 2014 statistics taken from the study "It's a Man's (Celluloid) World," released by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, unless otherwise noted:

Women constitute just 12% of protagonists (characters from whose perspective the story is told) featured in the top 100 grossing films.

Just 7% of directors and 11% of writers working on the top 250 grossing movies are women. ("Celluloid Ceiling" study, Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film).

Men are more likely than women to be identified primarily by a work-related role, such as doctor or business executive (61% of male characters versus 34% of females).

And of the top-grossing films for the last two decades, 77% of the crews were male. ("Gender Within Film Crews," producer Stephen Follows).

Not exactly cheery numbers for feminists.

"We never seem to get any momentum going," says Davis, Academy Award-winning actress and founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

The problem is the theory of the one-off.

"I remember when 'Thelma and Louise' came out, all of the press was predicting that this would start a whole wave of female-centric films," Davis says. "The next film I did was 'A League of Their Own,' which was also a big hit, and the same prediction was made, especially for female sport movies. But neither prediction proved true.

"[It's] the same for the many female-driven films over the last 20-plus years since then. No matter how successful female-centric films have been, Hollywood just keeps feeling they're one-offs, that men won't like films starring women, and so they should not be made often."

And because these female films are continuously seen by mostly male decision-makers as the exception, they're still considered high risk. And high risk makes those holding the economic strings of a project (again, primarily men) nervous, especially now, given the vast new developing economic markets.

"The economics of feature-filmmaking have dramatically changed in the last decade or so, with international sales to developing markets increasing hugely," says "Suffragette" producer Alison Owen. "These markets tend to be somewhat behind the curve in terms of gender equality and thus, the movies that do well in these markets are extremely male-skewed. So that's challenging for female filmmakers, with a female perspective."

"We've had a long history of filmmaking dominated by men, and it's hard to shift the paradigm and change attitudes," says "Suffragette" screenwriter Abi Morgan, "but it seems as if, at last, the tide may be turning."

That tide has seen some government action. Spurred by a request from the ACLU, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in October began investigating complaints of gender discrimination in Hollywood. It's an action that may well have penetrating consequences.

"Until a substantial number of decision-makers in the mainstream film industry recognize their own biases, acknowledge them as problematic, and take action to change their practices, we will not see significant changes in the behind-the-scenes and on-screen gender ratios," notes Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of San Diego State's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

Still, there's a glimmer of hope when even Martin Scorsese, the frequent director of testosterone-laden films, said while reflecting on his career at October's Lumière Film Festival in France that "it's never too late to learn" when asked about working on female-centric projects in the future.

Article by: Janet Kinosian/LA Times